Even though I haven’t been writing in this blog very much during the last moths, I had the chance to read many new (and old) interesting blog posts, articles and tutorial about Erlang.

Some of the stuff I had the chance to read was really well done and inspiring, therefore I would like to share these contents with you. In this blog post of mine I am going to make a list of the 4 articles that I loved most, with a brief description for each of team. Let’s start then!

Interesting Erlang stuff you should take a look at!

Create and Deploy Your Erlang/Cowboy Application on Heroku in 30 Minutes: In this blog post, Roberto Aloi explains how to create and deploy easily a web application written using Erlang and Cowboy. I liked this article very much: Roberto is one of the most famous Erlangers out there and even though the application he presents is really easy it’s always a pleasure to read some of his code. Moreover the part related to deploy focuses onHeroku the well known cloud platform, showing how easy it is to deploy our Erlang application there.

Continuous Integration for Erlang With Travis-CI: continuous integration (CI) is a powerful tool. While I was searching for a good CI service to be used with one of my Erlang projects I ended up reading this nice blog post by Ward Bekker. In his tutorial Ward explains briefly what are the main tool we have in Erlang to automate our tests and teaches how to connect a public GitHub repository to Travis-CI. I really liked this blog post, and if you are new to CI I suggest you to read as well this article by Martin Fowler: Continuous Integration.

Meck and Eunit Best Practices: TDD and testing in general are one of the things I am trying to learn more in these months. Even though this post by David Reid is not very recent (2011) I suggest you to read it if you want to learn more aboutMeck, the most famous Erlang mocking library written by Adam Lindberg. Once more, if you are new to mocking and so on, I suggest you once more to read a great article by Martin Fowler: Mocks Aren’t Stubs.

A Week with Elixir: That’s true,Elixiris not Erlang, but I think we all should read what the great Joe Armstrong thinks about this new interesting language written by José Valim. In his blog post Joe gives his impressions about Elixir and its syntax, providing code samples and really wonderful insights. If you want to know more about Elixir you can go to the official web page or consider buying this book by Dave Thomas.

And that’s all folks! I hope you will enjoy these stuff as much as I did!

Hello there! Today I want to introduce you my interview to John Koening. John is a PhD student at University of Minnesota in the fields of distributed and real time simulations. John is also working in the game studio he founded. Currently they are developing the game The Electric Adventures of Watt which has some Erlang in it.

Learning something more about Ymir

Paolo – Hello John and welcome to my blog! Can you please introduce yourself to our readers please?

John – Hi Paolo, thanks for having me. My name is John Koenig and I am a PhD student at the University of Minnesota (UMN) studying distributed, real-time simulation. I am going into the third year of my PhD program preparing for my written and oral defenses. I have been a regular Erlang-user for about 6 years.

Prior to, and inter-mixed with my time at UMN I worked at Cray Inc. Most recently I was contracted under Cray’s Chapel team where I worked on several language improvements in the area of portability. A majority of my time at Cray was spent as part of their Custom Engineering initiative. Together, we engineered unique super-computing platforms and software stacks for various customers.

In 2010, I founded a game studio, Called Shot LLC, with my good friends Gabriel Brockman and William Block. We are currently in the first round of funding for our flagship game title: The Electric Adventures of Watt.

Paolo – This is a common question I ask during my interviews: how did you start using Erlang? What are the features of Erlang that made you learn it?

John – I was first introduced to Erlang while pursuing my undergraduate degree at University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire (UWEC), I think it was around 2006. As part of a Programming Languages course we were tasked with picking a new language and implementing a solution to a sufficiently interesting problem which applied to the language’s domain. At the time, I was big into Plan 9 and distributed software in general so I chose Erlang and implemented a distributed prime number sieve.

Being more of an applied school, UWEC had me spending most of my time programming C and C++ and I remember being really impressed with how Erlang modeled processes and inter-process communication directly in the language. Once I got past Erlang’s syntax learning curve and my newness to functional programming, I found myself able to express distributed solutions very naturally in Erlang. After that, I was hooked. I picked up Joe’s book, Programming Erlang, and started keeping up with the Erlang community online.

I first started using Erlang professionally at Basho in early 2008 when I was brought on as a Reliability Engineer. I had thought, coming out of UWEC, that I knew Erlang fairly well, but I grew considerably during my six months at Basho. Justin and his development team are incredibly talented and being around that level of skill and enthusiasm was highly contagious. I remember that time fondly.

Paolo – Would you like to introduce and describe in a few lines what Ymir is? Where will Ymir be used?

John – Ymir is an open-source (GPL), cross-platform, distributed 3D game engine written in Erlang.

With the number of cores available to gamers on the rise, it is Ymir’s purpose to break games out of the traditional, single-core-dominate game-loop and, in doing so, achieve faster, larger simulations which grow in proportion to the number of available cores.

Paolo – Why did you decide to use Erlang for Ymir? Was there any other candidate language at the beginning of the project?

John – Ymir grew out of a desire to create a multi-player RPG that got away from the traditional client/server model. Myself and a few friends enjoyed online RPGs but didn’t enjoy the MMORPG scene. We were interested the approach of Neverwinter Nights 2, however, which featured smaller worlds developed and hosted by members of the community. Hosting of these worlds could get terribly expensive, as the worlds were hosted on a single server and, as their player base grew, admins of these worlds would be required to either co-locate their server or pay for expensive home internet access with sufficient upload speed. I set out to change this, wanting instead to see a game capable of simulating a world in a more peer-to-peer fashion. Namely, a game engine capable of utilizing the additional computational power and bandwidth present as players login to enjoy the simulated world.

I didn’t consider anything other than Erlang for this task. Along with OTP, Erlang is still the best language for distributed development as it allows me to focus more on the high-level challenges of distributed real-time simulation and less on the gritty details of implementing my own task-queues, inter-process communication, etc. This choice was further cemented when I proved that communication to port drivers, with minimal trickery, was sufficiently fast to support online rendering.

Paolo – Reading your paper I spotted many words often used among Erlang developers: scalable, soft-thread, message passing and minimal amount of synchronization. Would you like to discuss the meaning of each term with respect to Erlang and Ymir?

John – Game engines are traditionally frame-centric. Their primary goal is to compute and render frames as quickly as possible. Two aspects make this approach difficult when scaling over multiple cores: first, computing a frame is recursively dependent on the frames which came before it and, second, traditional spatial data structures used in collision detection require all game entities to be synchronized in order to function.

Ymir takes an object-centric approach and aggregates frames as quickly as possible. Game objects (entities) are represented as Erlang processes (soft-threads) and each entity is responsible for simulating itself locally. Discrete events (e.g. collisions, user-input) are modeled as messages which occur at a specific point in simulation time. As an optimization we allow entities to exist at various points in simulation time and to resolve events in the recent past by application of timewarp. Entities proceed through their local simulations, streaming updates to their physical state to relevant renderers. To enforce fairness, a sense of global time is defined as the minimum of all entity simulation times. This introduces a small amount of global synchronization as entities “vote”on the value of this global time through various shared ETS-based counters.

To break away from traditional spatial data-structures, Ymir applies map/reduce to spatial reasoning in order to achieve scalable collision detection. When simulating forward in time, entities volumetrically hash their physical extents against a fixed cube to various buckets (also soft-threads) and aggregate contacts which result from writing their latest physical states into each selected bucket. The act of mapping to spatial buckets is analogous to selecting nearest-neighbors (broadphase) and the buckets themselves compute points of contact for each pair of entities overlapping within its given volume of simulation space. In short, Ymir serializes only those objects which are sufficiently close together while permitting objects sufficiently separated in space to simulate unimpeded.

Using map/reduce in this fashion allows Ymir to scale-out over many cores very well. Currently, we are able to realize ~11x speedup in overall simulation time on 16 cores and sustained frame rates of ~500 fps. Ymir’s performance is dependent on many factors, however, chief among these is the degrees of freedom between entities. As entities are serialized based on spatial proximity, scenes where all entities exist in persistent contact are currently unable to obtain such lofty speedups. I am currently expanding our methods to better model persistent contact which will help Ymir obtain better speedups in these scenarios. Furthermore, using map/reduce to compute contacts works well locally or over low latency networks but as we scale up to many machines connected with higher latency other approaches will be needed. I am currently investigating network overlays between entities which capitalize on spatial assumptions present in game simulations.

Paolo – Do you have any partial results about Ymir our readers can take a look at? What kind of tests do you do on Ymir?

John – We are actively maintaining performance results on Ymir’s indiedb page, and as time permits I will be documenting Ymir more completely on our development blog.

This video showcases the three testing scenarios we used to gather our preliminary results. All three scenes are rendered offline using Ymir’s built-in support for Mitsuba. Parallel is rather boring to watch, but provides a best case performance. Cylinders features a stack of spheres falling onto an static array of cylinders and is more representative of the types of rigid body interactions one might see in an interactive game. Last, is Bounce in which spheres move randomly within fixed scene boundaries. Bounce is currently being used to measure Ymir’s performance as it relates to scene density.

Paolo – Is there any way our readers can contribute to the development of Ymir? Is there any fund-raising? Can other developers join the project?

John – Glad you asked, yes! We are currently on indiegogo seeking funding for The Electric Adventures of Watt which will be powered by Ymir. In supporting The Electric Adventures of Watt, contributors will be directly helping us mature Ymir into its first public release.

We will be advertising the public repositories for Ymir concurrently with its first official release. In the meantime, if developers are interested in working on Ymir, please, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me: john calledshot.org.

Paolo – You are a PhD student at the University of Minnesota and your studies are mainly focused on parallel and distributed real time simulation. Do you think Erlang could be widely used in these fields?

John – Without a doubt, that is what is what Erlang was designed for. There is even a precedent for using Erlang server-side for games: MuchDifferent and SMASH. I feel that as CPUs continue to have more cores and affordable CPU accelerators (i.e. parallela) become available, game developers will turn to solutions like Ymir to grow their games. Scalable, real-time simulation is not an easy undertaking and savvy developers will be looking for the right tools for the job.

As many Erlang enthusiasts know, there are at times substantial resistance to using languages that are outside of other developer’s comfort zones. This is especially true for academia. I can’t even count the number of times I have had to defend Erlang to my lab mates at UMN. That said, we are not expecting that all developers wishing to use Ymir will embrace Erlang, and we have on our roadmap to develop front-ends for languages most game developers will find familiar: C/C++/Lua.

Paolo – Did you find any help in the Erlang community? Did any Erlang developer give you feedback or support online during your development?

John – Several times I got frustrated with the performance of Mnesia and ETS for Ymir’s collision detection and I turned to the Erlang IRC channel for support and guidance. The Erlang community has been nothing but insightful and supportive every time I have turned to them. Although for the life of me I cannot remember that handles of those who offered help, I owe the Erlang community thanks.

We also owe special thanks to you, Paolo, for featuring Ymir on your blog, Peer Stritzinger for helping us reach out to the Erlang community, and to your readers.

Hello there! In this post you can read my interview to Kenji Rikitake. Kenji is a famous Erlang developer and security expert. I really loved this interview because Kenji provided some really interesting anectodes connected to his personal life and many insights on the IT in Japan.

The Erlanger from Japan

Paolo – Hello Kenji! It’s great to have you here! Please, can you describe yourself to our readers.

Kenji – My name is Kenji Rikitake. I am a relatively new user and programmer of Erlang; my experience is only about five years.

I’ve been working on various aspects of internet and distributed computing for 25 years. I started as a intern of VAX/VMS sysadmin in 1987. A couple of years later, I became a VAX/VMS Asian screen management library programmer and the product tester in 1990 at Digital Equipment Corporation Japan.

After leaving Digital in 1992, I decided to start my career as an internet sysadmin, or “devops” in the latest trendy word, and a volunteer evangelist of explaining how internet would change the world. I worked for a systems integration company called TDI, and co-designed and implemented a corporate firewall with BSD/OS systems and dedicated routers, including a simple fault tolerance. The firewall system was running until 2000 when I left the company. I’ve also written two books about internet engineering and technologies in Japanese.

From 2001 to 2005, I was a researcher at KDDI R&D Labs, about network security on intrusion systems, DNS protocol, and teleworking. During the period, I also conducted a joint research with Osaka University as a PhD student. My PhD thesis was about DNS reliability and security.

From 2005 to 2010, I was a researcher for National Institute of Communications and Information Technology (NICT), a research body of the Telecom Ministry of Japan. I involved in the preliminary design of a network intrusion early warning and analysis system called “nicter”, and later I pursued the DNS reliability research especially on the behavior of DNS packet fragments. I also worked in IPv6 and NGN security.

After I met Erlang/OTP in 2008, my research interests have shifted into the concurrency programming and the various related issues, including security, efficiency, and the robustness. Distributed database design is my latest research topic, for the obvious reason that I am currently working on building Riak. I’ve presented four talks at Erlang Factory SF Bay Area from 2010 to 2013, one for each year.

From 2010 to 2012, I was a Kyoto University full professor, though my primary role there was to implement and supervise the campus network security policies and procedures. I worked on two Mersenne-Twister random number implementations for Erlang, called SFMT and TinyMT, which are published in ACM Erlang Workshop 2011 and 2012. I also organized the 2011 Workshop held in Tokyo, as the Workshop General Chair.

I’m currently working for Basho Japan, a Japanese subsidiary of Basho Technologies.

I’m an electronic geek, and my Twitter handle @jj1bdx is derived from my primary ham radio call sign in Japan, which I’ve been assigned since 1976. Morse Code on the shortwave is one of my favorites on the radio, though from 1986 to 1990 I also involved in the packet radio activities based on TCP/IP. Music is another thing that makes me happy.

Paolo – First real question: how did you meet the functional programming world?

Kenji – I first read a Lisp book in the early 1980s when I was a teenager. I was not that interested in the S-expression though, because I didn’t have an execution environment then. It was even before the C language for the personal computers; I was playing around with my Apple II, mostly in the assembly language, and two tiny programming languages called GAME and TL/1. I even wrote a GAME compiler for 6502 running on Apple II.

Before starting my real career, I was a lab member of Professor Eiiti Wada from 1988 to 1990, at the University of Tokyo. Prof. Wada and his lab members created a Lisp implementation called UtiLisp, and the lab was the most advanced place in the campus networking. I was also learned some basic ideas on the functional and even logic programming, because of the nationwide buzzword called The Fifth Generation Computers. Some of the Wada lab alumni were the key designers and implementers of the language called Guarded Horn Clauses, which has surprisingly similar design philosophy to Erlang, although it is a logic programming language.

My problem about understanding functional/logic programming was, however, that I couldn’t really grasp the core reasons why those programming paradigms were effective and even required for a large-scale system design. I failed on a Prolog course in 1989 either because I didn’t find the unification principle was anything meaningful. So I was a very bad student. I wish I could have learned it in the Erlang way of the pattern matching then!

And unfortunately my mind in the late 1980s was too focused on how to run UUCP and email systems in an inexpensive way without UNIX, so any functional or logical programming paradigms seemed redundant to me, because they were so slow. I didn’t like regular commuting from my home to the university, so I wanted a way to discover a way of working from home. At that time my main target of code hacking at home was MS-DOS then; I had to wait until 1993 when I could use BSD/OS at home for experiencing the real UNIX at home. I later moved into FreeBSD in 1997. And I’ve been running Erlang/OTP mostly on FreeBSD since 2008.

Paolo – And when did you first hear about Erlang?

Kenji – I first saw a Japanese translation of Joe Armstrong’s “Programming Erlang”, published by Ohmsha in November 2007, at a bookstore I visited in Tokyo downtown in February 2008, on my way back home from Tokyo to Osaka. I instinctively found out this was the once I had to learn and go for, so I immediately bought it and started discovering the world of Erlang since then.

Paolo – You told me that you had some bad times during your experiences as developer and University Professor, but also that Erlang and functional programming helped you to overcome your difficulties. Can you tell our readers something about that?

Kenji – Let me start from my programming middle-age crisis first.

I have concentrated my programming effort to C since 1986. I haven’t really grasped the idea of the strict control of the module name space in Java, neither the template-based extension made by C++, even at this moment I am answering to the interview in 2013. Of course I can manage to handle other script based languages such as awk, Python (which is quite good), Ruby, or even JavaScript. I know programmers can no longer choose the languages because every system has chosen the best language for running. But that doesn’t mean you can just improvise all the code; you need to have deep knowledge base on at least a few languages.

I was looking for something completely new and innovative for a programming system to learn, after I thought working only on C was no longer sufficient to keep myself up as a modern programmer. I was sick and tired of understanding and modifying the BIND 9 DNS server code, written mostly in C, for a DNS research paper I was writing then. I don’t blame the BIND 9 programmers because it does really complex magic things, and I admire ISC people especially Paul Vixie, one of my mentors in Digital Equipment and the father of BIND. Nevertheless, having to read hundreds of header macro lines to reach the actual code looked no longer practical to me at that time. And I thought I would have lost my competitiveness as a programming person then, if I stuck into the old way of C programming. So eventually I become a polyglot programmer; I use C, awk, Python, Perl, and Erlang.

I knew multi-core or massive-parallel computing hardware is coming and I wanted to learn something very much different from the past sequential and inherently procedural programming languages and systems. While Erlang is *not* specifically designed for a massive-parallel execution environment, Erlang does have a lot of practical constraints for modern computing hardware requirements embedded in the language, for example the single-assignment variable principle, and the OTP system themselves, for example the gen_server behaviour [sic] framework, to solicit the programmers to do the least wrong things. This is something which other languages cannot emulate or mimic.

Next about the University Professor life crisis.

During my Kyoto University career, most of the things I had been doing there was talking, negotiating, and dealing with people, not with computers. The university is a very large organization, and keeping the campus network secure is something practically impossible without the university member’s help, namely from the administrative, education, research staff, and of course from the students. I am an introvert person and most of the university people are not geeks although many are excellent researchers, so the human communication tasks were the toughest thing to do in my life. Also the long-time commuting from my house to the office, spending four hours in total every day, literally killed me.

Fortunately I was allowed to do the CS research activity, however, during the Kyoto University career. And I was eligible to run a large batch jobs on a large Linux supercomputer cluster. So I decided to run some Erlang code and do the fun things over there. One good thing about Erlang is that it is mostly OS independent, so I did the prototyping on my home FreeBSD machines, and let the huge multi-core jobs run on the cluster. I’ve put the research result into GitHub. So I didn’t have to throw away the possibility of my career as a CS researcher 🙂

Paolo – You are widely respected not only for your knowledge on Erlang/OTP but also for your expertise on distributed system security. What is the intersection between these two fields?

Kenji – Erlang/OTP is a very good candidate for making a reliable system. This means it would be a prospective candidate even for a secure system, if properlydesigned. In other words, an unreliable system could *never* be secure. And every system is not 100% reliable.

The word “security” has a lot of implications in many different aspects, and is widely misused in many contexts, even if I exclude the militaristic and socialistic implications, which may be out of scope of this interview, though very serious issues themselves indeed.

I believe that the foundation of a secure system is a reliable and fault-tolerant system. This has been frequently ignored even by many “security” experts; for many of them, security is only about cryptography, or about restricting the user’s behavior in a system, or just about analyzing the behavior of the pieces of malware. I do not deny those aspects, they are very important, and the outcomes of those research activities are surely essential for making a better computer system, but those aspects are not only *the* security. A very broad perspective is needed for a computer security expert.

Also, I have to stress that security is mostly about people and how people behave. People want convenient systems; at many circumstances, security and convenience do not coexist. For example, if you really want a secure system, do not connect it to the internet. But such a special system, which could enable you to provide sufficient communication capability within the system while rejecting all the attack thwarts and zero attack vector, is virtually impossible to make, from the financial point of view. See the Stuxnet case? Consider what if the power plant were using Erlang/OTP as the core and the end-point controllers.

I wish Erlang/OTP developers always think about making a reliable software. It’s not that difficult; thinking carefully when programming will solve most of the cases.

Paolo – What is the best way to “secure” an Erlang distributed systems?

Kenji – Traditionally, putting the whole systems in a protected network, is the only solution. And unfortunately it has still been so.

This is a very good question to answer, because in the current Distributed Erlang (disterl) system on the OTP, the security model is very weak if any existed. TLS-based disterl (with the ssl and crypto modules) will be a good solution to protect the communication between BEAMs, but the problem is that the communication between BEAMs and the port-mapper daemons are plain text and it’s not trivial to incorporate necessary authentication and cryptographic features.

Erlang/OTP has been depending on the assumption that the whole disterl cluster is in a protected network without any attack vectors. In other words, the disterl cluster itself was considered a system without protection. Opening the communication ports to the internet, however, makes this assumption rather unrealistic; the Erlang/OTP devops must think about all the possible attack vectors for the disterl cluster as a whole system.

One possibility on protecting BEAM-to-BEAM communication is to establish cryptographically authenticated links between the BEAMs and let the links be used persistently, with proper periodic re-keying, without using any port-mapper daemon. I believe incorporating such a facility into Erlang is not that difficult, though the rendez-vous problem between the multiple BEAMs should be solved in another way.

Paolo – During your experience as Professor at Kyoto University, you did also research activity using Erlang and OTP. You worked in particular on SFMT and TinyMT. Would you like to introduce these two projects to our readers?

Kenji – Mersenne Twister (MT), a BSD-licensed innovative long-period (typically 2^19937 – 1) non-cryptographic pseudo random number generator (PRNG) by Profs. Makoto Matsumoto and Takuji Nishimura, has become the de facto standard on popular programming languages such as Python and R. SIMD-oriented Fast MT (SFMT) and TinyMT are the improved algorithms, by Profs. Makoto Matsumoto and Mutsuo Saito. The MT algorithms have all a very high order of equidistribution, which fits very well on a large-scale simulation, including the software testing.

SFMT is an improved version of the original MT, which is even faster than the MT, and has a tunable characteristics of the generation period and the sequence generation. TinyMT is another variant of MT, which has a much shorter generation period (2^127 – 1) and smaller memory footprint, but is still suitable for most simulation use. The algorithm of TinyMT is much compact than SFMT or MT, and can generate a massive number (~ 2^56) of independent orthogonal number sequences, which is suitable for massive-parallel asynchronous PRNG.

I am not a mathematician so I cannot mathematically prove how MT and the derivatives are better than the other algorithms. But I have to emphasize very much that Erlang/OTP’s random module is still using an archaic old algorithm invented in 1980s which has a significantly shorter generation period (~ 2^43), and that has already become an indirect source of security vulnerability once (CVE-2011-0766, discovered by Geoff Cant). SFMT and TinyMT have much better characteristics than the random module, and I strongly suggest you to try them out if you really need a better non-cryptographic PRNG.

Recently I have put 256M (= 2^28) precomputed keys of TinyMT 32-bit and 64-bit generation parameters. This archive is huge (~82GB), but if you would like to use TinyMT for a serious simulation, it is worth taking a look for. The archive is at: https://github.com/jj1bdx/tinymtdc-longbatch/

Paolo – Currently you are working at Basho Japan. Can I ask you what is like to work in one of the most acknowledged Erlang companies? How much Erlang code do you see in your working daily routine?

Kenji – Basho developers are all superb and are very energetic on making Riak and recently-open-sourced Riak CS even more better products. Working with such talented engineers and keeping yourself up with them is very very tough, but if you are capable to point bugs and propose contributions which have proven to work correctly to Basho’s open-sourced projects, you will surely be welcome.

I would also like to emphasize that Basho is not just an Erlang company. You need to know every programming languages and the computer science elements, from C, C++, Java, Python, Ruby, to the gory details of distributed database, including how the vector clocks work and commutative/conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs). Riak, Riak CS, and rebar, include a lot of their by-products. See the deps/ directory under Riak and you will be astonished. On the other hand, there might be many ways to contribute your skills.

I would also like to emphasize that Basho’s client service engineers, sales and marketing people including the documentation experts, and all the other staff members, are closely working together with the developers and maintain the high standard of delivering the quality service and products.

I can only answer that the amount of Erlang code I have to see is *enormous*. 🙂

Paolo – I am very interested about Erlang and Japan. Is Erlang a niche programming language there as well or is it spreading fast as in the US and north Europe?

Kenji – I would rather want to ask the question back: is Erlang a popular language in anywhere in the world? I think the answer is probably no, comparing to the popularity of Java or C++. Looking at the TIOBE index will prove this. And I’d rather say nobody cares about that, because whether a language is spreading fast or not has already become irrelevant, comparing to the jobs or tasks what you want to get done with the language.

I do understand Erlang has gained a larger momentum in Sweden, where the language is from. And I see many people solving problems with Erlang in Europe. And in the USA and Canada (hi Fred!). And in Japan too, especially for the server-side programming solutions. So I feel the developers in Japan are slowly but surely showing more interests.

Getting back to the situation in Japan: I think not many people are interested in whatever the new paradigm of programming, except for relatively small number of communities. Fortunately, those communities surely exist. And some visionaries have discovered some languages, such as Haskell, OCaml, or Erlang, to solve *their* problems and helping others solving the problems. But for the majority of programmers, most of the details are “not really something to be carefully taken care of and to be blindly delegated to the experts”, also called the *omakase* attitude in Japan. So most programmers just do the omakase to the Rails, or to Java libraries, or to the pre-built C++ libraries. And that irresponsible attitude towards their profession, though not necessarily only of their sole responsibilities, cause a lot of sometimes lethal or disastrous bugs in the production systems. Unfortunately, many of programmers in Japan are not well-educated as the software engineers, and their supervisors are sometimes even worse. Their mindset of dumping the risks (or *doing the marunage*) for every difficult problem makes things even worse.

I think programming is not something for omakase and the quality of code will not be sufficient so long as major users of computers are doing the marunage to the developers in Japan. And I believe Erlang/OTP is not for the people who are not willing to take the risk of their own computer systems. On the other hand, for those who want to maintain the system by themselves or at least to eagerly, deliberately, and willingly take the responsibility of running the system without major outage, Erlang/OTP will become a great tool because the system provides the critical and essential functions such as non-stopping module replacement.

Paolo – As many other Erlang gurus out there, you are very active not only when it comes to promote new Erlang applications but also when Erlang newbies ask for support or suggestions. In your opinion what are the factors that make the Erlang community so nice?

Kenji – I was pretty much impressed by the friendly environment of the erlang-questions mailing list and the modest attitude of the experienced Erlang community-driving people there, when I first asked some questions. I just read and read and read all the things in the Erlang-related mailing lists as much as I could. Erlang Workshop papers were also a set of excellent source of information. And now we’ve been full of good code in GitHub, including the OTP itself. So we’ve got many many more things ready to learn now for free!

I’ve heard that one of the old sayings in the Erlang community is “no prima donna allowed”. This is so important for maintaining a community. I understand everybody wants to get grumpy sometimes, and quite often flame wars occur, but many people just endure and keep silent. I respect this rather European or even Swedish way of getting rid of chaos 🙂

Paolo – I think that the Erlang community is growing fast: many applications, conferences and new books, still most of the developers out there don’t know that behind many of the tools they use every day there is a piece of Erlang. How would you explain that?

Kenji – I think this is in fact a very good thing. People want to solve their own problems in whatever tools they have to use, or they think suitable to use. Erlang has flexible package release tools which can minimize the users of the package to think about the installation of Erlang/OTP itself. In many popular applications, the Erlang virtual machine and the necessary libraries are silently built-in and being there; and most people don’t care whether it uses Erlang/OTP or not so long as the software works OK. Erlang/OTP has become a part of the infrastructural ecosystem.

Of course, there is a strong negative side of this trend, too; developers are doing the marunage with the omakase attitude to the developer of those infrastructural tools with no knowledge about the tools. I try not to fall in this trap by building all user-land programs, kernels, and the Port programs of my FreeBSD development servers, at least for the past ten years. You have to think about the bugs if you have to build your own tools; this is a very good way to learn a new thing. You need to forcefully do so frequently.

The series is composed by 8 chapters (even though I would prefer calling them “lectures”):

Introduction

Basic Erlang

Sequential Programming

Concurrent Programming I

Concurrent Programming II

Process Error Handling

Mobile Frequency Server I

Mobile Frequency Server II

I guess that many of you (especially the non Erlangers ones) are now wondering: “What are the topics in detail? Who is the target audience? Should I buy the videos instead of a normal book? Are these videos really so good?” Well, let me answer that in the rest of this post.

What are the topics in details? – As you may notice from the list above the video lectures starts with the basics (data types, variables, pattern matching, etc etc.). After that you will learn things mostly related to sequential programming and concurrency. A good point of these videos is that you will end up with something real: a simple client-server application handling mobile frequencies. Notice that in the list above there is no reference to OTP: in fact you won’t learn about OTP here, but I believe many Erlangers are right when they say: “Learn with ‘normal’ Erlang and code your application using OTP”.

Who is the target audience? – Good question. Are you new to Erlang development? If so buy these videos. You will learn much and in a fast way. On the other hand I think that many experienced Erlang developer should take a look at these lessons, not only to review the basic concepts but also to hear the considerations and the suggestions of two of the most respected Erlangers out there. Sure, if you know Erlang very well you will skip some stuff, but still you will enjoy the lectures in their whole.

Should I buy the videos instead of a normal book? – No. Don’t do it! I have to be clear here: you won’t learn Erlang just by watching these videos. I believe these videos must be considered as a wonderful integration of what you read on a real book. As I wrote above you will benefit from the talking between the authors, but I must say that nothing beats the good old detailed books (especially the paper ones). So my advice is to select one of the many Erlang books out there, read it and complete the study chapter by chapter using these videos.

Are the videos really so good? – Yes they are, both for content quality and video quality. I must admit that every time I see some content authored by Francesco Cesarini and Simon Thompson I feel at ease. My first Erlang Book ever was “Erlang Programming” and since then Francesco and Simon never let me down. I believe this is mostly related to their great experience in teaching and consulting: they know what to say, when to say it and how to say it. The quality of the videos is great too! The videos are 1280 × 720 and last on average ~15 minutes and this time amount is perfect because you never got bored or tired while watching them. I would like to point out that I read in some reviews people complaining about codec problems, but before writing this post I tried them in Ubuntu, Mac, Windows 7 and iPad and didn’t notice any kind of problem.

That’s all folks! Now it’s up to you: are you going to buy these videos???

There is one sure thing about programming: you should try to improve your set of skills in a regular way. There are several different methods to achieve this kind of result: reading books and blogs, working on your own pet project and doing pair programming are all very good examples of this, but today I want to introduce you code kata. What is a kata? Well, since you ask, you won’t mind if I digress for a while first!

What is a kata?

In Japanese, the word kata is used to describe choreographed patterns of movements that are practised in solo or possibly with a partner. Kata are especially applied in martial arts because they do represent a way of teaching and practicing in a systematic approach rather than as individuals in a clumsy manner. If the concept of kata is still not clear (shame on me!) you just need to watch again the movie Karate Kid. For the whole movieMr. Miyagi San teaches Daniel LaRussothe importance of kata and we know that Miyagi San is always right!

The basic concept behind kata is fairly simple: if we keep on practicing in a repetitive manner we can acquire the ability to execute movements without hesitation and to adapt them to a set of different situations without any fear. Pretty cool uh?

Coming back to the good old world of software developers (and especially Erlang ones) we may ask ourselves: “how can we apply the concept of kata to our daily routine?”. David Thomas (one of the authors of “The Pragmatic Programmer”) introduced the concept of Code Kata which is a programming exercise useful to improve our knowledge and skills through practice and repetition. The interesting point of code kata is that usually the exercises proposed are easy and can be implemented on a step-by-step fashion.

Let’s do Kata togheter Daniel san!

The kata I will show you today is the FizzBuzz one. In this post we will focus only on the initial parts of stage 1: the rules can be found at Coding Dojo, but I think I will rewrite them here for the lazy ones 🙂

write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100

for the multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number

for the multiples of five print “Buzz” instead of the number

for numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”

I will solve the FizzBuzz kata using TDD and this means that I will follow this pattern during my coding:

write a test using Eunit

run the test ->it fails

write the code to make the test pass (dumb solution)

run the test -> it passes

refactor

go to step 1

Let’s start coding then!

In this post I will write the tests and the logic inside the same file even though I know that this is not a good practice. Remember: you should never mix logic and tests in the same file. Usually what we do in Erlang is creating a test directory at the same level of ebin and src and save all our tests there, anyhow this is somehow out of the scope of this article which is about kata and I want to write this post only using one Erlang file, so forgive me for this horrible sin and let me start with our kata!

Let’s do Kata togheter Daniel san! (This time for real)

Let’s start by writing a first EUnit test where we ensure that given a number we return that number as a string:

-module(fizzbuzz).
-include_lib("eunit/include/eunit.hrl").
%% Test that given a number we return that number as a string
normal_number_test() ->
?assertEqual("2", evaluate(2)).

Rember a failing test is a good news here, because as Kent Beck says: “failure is progress”. Our first test is failing for an obvious reason: we don’t have a function evaluate/1 in our module, so we can start by coding a dumb implementation for evaluate/1 that makes our test pass.

-module(fizzbuzz).
-export([evaluate/1]).
-include_lib("eunit/include/eunit.hrl").
evaluate(_Num) ->
"2".
%% Test that given a number we return that number as a string
normal_number_test() ->
?assertEqual("2", evaluate(2)).

As expected the test is failing, in fact we didn’t add any new functionality to our code and therefore a failure is still a good news. Let’s make the test pass then!

This is the code you may have after implementing the aforesaid “Fizz” functionality. I believe this time we can skip a dumb solution and provide the real one as follows:

-module(fizzbuzz).
-export([evaluate/1]).
-include_lib("eunit/include/eunit.hrl").
evaluate(Num) when Num rem 3 =:= 0->
"Fizz";
evaluate(Num) ->
integer_to_list(Num).
%% Test that given a number we return that number as a string
normal_number_test() ->
?assertEqual("2", evaluate(2)).
%% Test that given a number divisible by 3 we return the string "Fizz"
divisible_by_3_test() ->
?assertEqual("Fizz", evaluate(3)).

Our code behaves pretty well right? At this point we should do some refactoring (of both code and tests) and then add tests and implementations for the Buzz and FizzBuzz cases. Moreover we should add a function that prints all the numbers from 1 to 100 on screen but I think I will leave all this stuff to you as homework for a couple of reasons:

I don’t like writing blog posts too long, they tend to make my readers take a nap

I don’t like writing blog posts with wall of code either, they tend to make my blog uglier

I guess you may want to try solving this kata by yourself 🙂

This is all I have to say about the FizzBuzz kata…or not? Well, I can add some useful information here:

What’s up Erlang addicts? Here is another interview you may find of interest.

In the post I prepared for you today you will learn something about Dialyzer from Stavros Aronis. Stavros is a PhD student at Uppsala University and will be one of the speakers at the upcoming EUC 2013. The talk will be: “Parallel Erlang – Speed beyond Concurrency”. Hope you will enjoy it!

Dialyzer is your friend!

Paolo – Hi Stavros. Thanks for accepting my interview. Would you like to introduce yourself to our readers?

Stavros – Hi Paolo! Thank you for the invitation. I am Stavros Aronis, I come from Greece and I am currently a PhD student in the IT department of the Uppsala University.

Paolo – Your experience with Erlang started in Greece. Can you tell us something about your first projects with Erlang?

Stavros – I didn’t know anything about the language until the final years of my studies at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). I was looking for an interesting topic for my diploma thesis and I turned for suggestions to Kostis Sagonas, who was then the head teacher of the Programming Languages courses there. I don’t think that I need to introduce Kostis here, as he is evidently popular in the Erlang community! At that time, Kostis had quite a few projects for diploma thesis students (I was working together with the students who developed the 0.1 versions of PropEr and Concuerror) and I decided to work on Dialyzer. My very first task was to implement support for the callback attributes and add them to the behaviors in the OTP distribution. After that I worked for a while on extending Dialyzer’s detection of race conditions to work on code that uses behaviors, but then I changed my focus and worked on enhancing Dialyzer’s type inference algorithm so that it could detect errors that were not possible to catch before.

Paolo – Currently you are a PhD student at Uppsala University, a place widely known by Erlangers. Can you give us some insight about the researches you do there?

Stavros – My current research is on Concuerror, a tool for exploring all the possible ways that the processes of an Erlang program can be interleaved during scheduling. In the simplest terms, you give a test to Concuerror and it returns to you a scheduling scenario that makes one of your processes throw an uncaught exception or leads your processes to a state where they are all waiting for some message and no progress can be made. If Concuerror is unable to do either, then there is no possible scheduling of your test that can lead to these generally undesired states. Kostis’ presentation in the Erlang User Conference 2013 will be on Concuerror.

There are two more PhD students working on Erlang in our group in Uppsala University, David Klaftenegger and Kjell Winblad. They will also be in the EUC’13, presenting their research on improving the concurrent performance of ETS tables.

Paolo – At Erlang User Conference 2013 you will give a talk about the parallel use of Erlang and the tool Dialyzer. Can you provide a brief description of your talk? Why should we parallelize Dialyzer?

Stavros –My talk will be about my experience from parallelizing Dialyzer, work that was included in OTP R15B02. It was a task that I already wanted to work on in Greece, as for the evaluation of my diploma thesis I wanted to run Dialyzer on the entire Erlang/OTP codebase to see whether I would catch any new errors. The extension I was developing made Dialyzer quite slower (this is by the way the reason it has not yet been included in OTP), so having to run it two times to compare results was already time consuming. I remember my frustration back then, as I was watching only one of the processors of my dual core laptop do all the work while the other was idling! With Erlang having such a wonderful support for concurrency, it was obvious that parallelizing Dialyzer should not be a very challenging task. The real story of course was a little different, with some interesting twists which I want to share with the other participants of the conference.

Paolo – Who should follow your talk and why? Is the talk only for experienced Erlang developers?

Stavros – Not at all! The talk has no real requirements, other than elementary understanding of Erlang’s concurrency primitives (spawn, send, receive and inserts/lookups on public ets tables). I want to show how easy it is using these primitives to parallelize an algorithm in a very natural way and what unique caveats you may run into.

Paolo – When should we use Dialyzer?

Stavros – At the very least, every time you want to commit changes on any Erlang project! Dialyzer is (famously) a totally automatic, “push button” tool, that you configure easily, just once, with the code that you depend on and trust to be correct, and then you are good to go. It is not a coincidence that celebrated members of the Erlang community, like Loic Hoguin, require that any contributions to their projects produce no Dialyzer errors. Dialyzer will catch many of the errors that you would otherwise have to write tests for (e.g. an erroneous call to a function in a rarely reached path in your code) and will also catch many that you could not detect otherwise (e.g. dead code, wrong specs).

Paolo – How much time/effort can we now expect when running Dialyzer?

Stavros – As I said, Dialyzer is fully automatic so it shouldn’t really require any effort to use. You just give your modules as input and you get warnings that are ‘always right’. Dialyzer will never produce a warning if there is no real issue. Fixing the problem is the only part where you really spend effort.

Regarding the time it takes, Dialyzer’s analysis is very much dependent on the structure of your code. On our most difficult real test, analyzing the entire OTP distribution, using the parallel version we managed to bring execution time from 1 hour 20 minutes down to 6 minutes (13x faster) on a 32 core machine. Scalability is very good on desktop machines as well: the aforementioned test scales linearly up to 4 cores.

Paolo – Last question: what do you see in the future of Erlang and Dialyzer? Is it possible to improve what we have now and if so how?

Stavros – The recent research in our group has shown that there is still plenty of room for improvements in the performance of the Erlang VM on big multicore machines. Operations of ETS tables are already being optimized and we plan to target the schedulers next. Uppsala University is a partner of the RELEASE (http://www.release-project.eu/) project, that aims to improve the scalability of the Erlang VM on thousands of cores. Ericsson is also a partner of RELEASE, so the OTP team is also contributing significantly with improvements in other parts of the VM.

Dialyzer has currently no major updates scheduled. However, I will at some point find some time to update and include my diploma thesis contributions in the OTP, so that Dialyzer will be able to catch even more errors, before you have to really think about them!

Hello! Today you can read in my blog my interview to Peer Stritzinger. Peer is a famous entrepreneur and Erlang developer who deals with several technologies connected to embedded electronic systems. Peer will give the talkFull Metal Erlangat the upcomingErlang User Conference 2013. Enjoy!

Erlang? Let’s do some embedded systems with it!

Paolo – Hi Peer! Thanks for accepting my interview. Would you like to describe youself in a few words to our readers?

Peer – Hi Paolo! Thank you for your interest, I’m honored to be considered for one of your interviews — I have been enjoying your blog since your first interview. I work as software and product developer in my small company. Since I’m currently my companies sole employee I also have to double for all other necessary roles necessary. In the Munich area where I’m located we have a network of companies who join forces for larger projects however. For example for my products for Automotive Embedded Control Unit flashing, the custom developed hardware was built by a partner company. Besides developing my own products I work as contractor for a wide spectrum of customers. It happens that many contracts are involved in one way or another with Embedded-Systems development where I have the advantage that I have experience with the very close to the hardware stuff and higher level system design and implementation.

Paolo – As many other Erlangers you started with a MSc. in Physics. How did you end up programming?

Peer – Well I can’t say I “ended up” in programming. Writing code fascinated me since my teens, and so did Mathematics and Physics. When I had to choose which track to take starting University I thought it would be easier to take Physics and do some Computer-Science classes on the side than the other way round. And it worked out pretty well, I cherry picked the interesting stuff from Computer-Science and did my MSc. (was actually called Diplom back then in Germany) in Physics. I did take a code centric approach to Physics also, writing simulations and dabbling with Reduce (a early computer algebra system). I added a bit of Biology to the mix, specializing in Biophysics (theoretical and experimental). Back then artificial Neural-Networks were being researched a lot and that meshed nicely with my interests.

Paolo – Part of your work focuses on Embedded Systems, a field mostly ‘ruled’ by C programmers. How come you started using Erlang?

Peer – Well I’m a C programmer also, but always had a high interest in all kinds of functional and symbolic programming languages. The kinds of Embedded Systems I usually built were often on the more complex and dynamic side. I didn’t do much eight bit controller programming contracts but more the 32bit end implementing more complex architectures with many protocols. Often there was some Hard-Realtime stuff in them but only about 10% of the code had to deal with it.

My first system I wrote in Erlang was however running on an embedded motherboard with a UNIX (first OpenBSD currently FreeBSD) class OS on it. It was the second version of my Automotive ECU Flashing system Hydraprog. The first version was written completely in C and I didn’t want to do the second version in C again — I was seeing that a more dynamic language with GC would be helpful (Java was out because I already had to use it for a past contracting job and didn’t like it very much). At the same time I planned to split up the big-box with many parallel channels into a networked boxes with two channels each, to make it possible to scale capacity more flexibly.

The distribution made me look at Erlang and the fault-tolerance and bit-pattern matching sold me on it. Since this was a real product with a real deadline I gave myself 4 weeks into the development which was basically the point of no-return where I still could have switched back to C. After these 4 weeks I had made so much progress, although I was still learning Erlang. There was no way going back.

Paolo – What are the benefits and the drawbacks one can experience by using Erlang instead of C for Embedded Systems?

Peer – The benefits are many, you get much more done in the same time. This translates directly into faster time to market and lower development cost. That Erlang/OTP has industrial strength implementation, well most of the Embedded Systems I work with are used in industrial use cases. These is are exactly the use cases where the phrase “industrial strength” comes from.

Then there are the whole Erlang/OTP fault tolerance and fault isolation features. You can imagine that this fault tolerance comes in handy if you are building systems to be used on the assembly line. We already use hardware watchdogs to restart systems that are stuck, but there you can only restart the whole system. It’s basically as if Erlang only had the Heartbeat Monitoring (http://erlang.org/doc/man/heart.html) and nothing else.

Plenty of OTP’s infrastructure features are needed in Embedded Systems, it’s like it was built for them. Which it actually was because the phone switches Erlang was invented for are very similar to todays Embedded Systems.

Also maintainability: Embedded Systems usually have to be maintained for 10-15 years, sometimes even longer. A system written in Erlang is much more maintainable than a system of same complexity that is written in C.

A lot of current Embedded Systems software only manages to deal with all this by being very simplistic, they have a hard time with the modern connected world. There is a lot of talking of M2M (Machine to Machine) communication and Industry 4.0, Internet of Things and all these buzzwords. For an Erlang developer these are fun things to do in Erlang. Many companies are not ready for this with their inflexible systems only written only in C, many are sitting on the side waiting for their world to get easy again. The handful of companies using Erlang for Embedded System will eat their lunch.

You also asked about drawbacks. You can in theory write a faster system that uses less CPU power and less memory in C. So if you have to fit your application in 1Mb on CPU Flash and only have 120 kB of on CPU Flash, then Erlang is hardly able to run on this system. Systems like these are used for high piece count applications like car electronics. There are many Embedded Systems that have much lower piece count being built, they often have external Flash and RAM on their boards. If you switch from the until now often used NOR Flashes to a NAND Flash, then suddenly you have so much space for the same price that you can easily fit a complete OTP release on it. In these systems the advantage of lowering the development costs is also worth most.

As for speed, a small piece of code in a micro benchmark is a lot faster in C than in Erlang. But many experienced Erlang developers found out that somehow the performance of whole systems is often quite good or even superior. I had just suspected my Erlang code for my Hydraprog flashing system of being responsible for slower than wanted flash time. But when I profiled my Erlang code (which is very easy, a luxury not many Embedded Systems developers have) I found out that the whole runtime of the Erlang code was only 6 seconds in a Flash Session that takes about 1000 seconds. Now I’m looking at the C code in the system, which somehow manages to produce substantial latency.

And finally it’s: don’t use C or Erlang, use both. Write as much code as possible in Erlang and write everything that really needs to be in C in C.

Paolo – At EUC 2013 you will give a talk about your port of Erlang to RTEMS. First of all what is RTEMS and in which devices is it used?

Peer – RTEMS is a Open-Source Hard-Realtime Embedded OS for smaller Embedded-Systems. It runs on basically every architecture used in Embedded that has a 32bit core (there is some experimental work to even make it run on AVR’s). The needed code size and RAM to run can be scaled to run on smaller SoC’s which have Flash and RAM on chip. It runs on devices used in manufacturing and in automotive control units. It is used by NASA and ESA on a variety of satellites and planetary missions. So you can see it is used like Erlang for applications where reliability is the top priority (for more details see http://www.rtems.org)

Paolo – Was it difficult to port thr Erlang VM to RTEMS? What are the features of the VM and Erlang you had to sacrifice if any?

Peer – One main difference to Unix like OS is that RTEMS doesn’t have processes in the Unix sense with separate memory. So it looks like one Unix process running multiple threads. So it kind of makes no sense to run multiple Erlang nodes on one RTEMS OS. When Erlang is started on “normal” OS with distribution enabled it needs the epmd daemon running as separate process. But we don’t have such a separate process on RTEMS. So one way would be to hack the empd C code to run alongside with the Erlang VM or implement a restricted epmd in Erlang and make it start before the distribution support comes up. I’m implementing the later approach (epmd in Erlang).

One more hurdle was that until very recently RTEMS had no support for dynamic linking. For using NIF’s dynamic linking is quite essential. First I thought I could do without NIF’s since linked in drivers don’t have this problem and can be linked statically. But then I can’t use built in stuff that uses NIF’s like e.g. crypto which would mean no easy SSL/TLS support for protocols which we need. I think I have to go back a step and tell you how a RTEMS application is built. With RTEMS the OS comes as a bunch of libraries that gets linked together with the application code to form one executive image that is booted on the hardware (either via a boot loader or right from the reset vector). What I did initially was to bake the Erlang runtime together with the RTEMS libs into one executable. This is a bit hard to maintain and use since there is no real place for the C part of the application. Normally there will be C parts for Hard-Realtime parts (we can do Hard and Soft Realtime mixed on a RTEMS+Erlang system) or drivers. Drivers in RTEMS are often just a C module that accesses the hardware registers directly. Until now I have a special make that copies the application C files into OTP’s source tree an patches the statically linked in driver list, then it builds OTP with RTEMS build tools and creates a RTEMS executable.

Just recently however some dynamic linking support is being added to RTEMS. So instead of faking dynamic linking for NIF’s I’ll use the new support and I also get a nice way to build Erlang and RTEMS as separate objects which makes it easier to distribute a prebuilt Erlang runtime for each architecture that will be supported and the device specific parts (called Board Support Package = BSP) and C application parts can just be linked to it.

Besides that RTEMS has a pretty good POSIX API support and Erlang has nice cross building support built in so that was a nice fit.

Paolo – Who should attend your talk? What will your audience know at the end of it?

Peer – My talk is intended for Erlang developers or Erlang developers in spe who are interested in Embedded and Realtime applications of Erlang. Also everyone who finds it interesting to run Erlang practically right on the bare hardware. RTEMS is getting SMP support at the moment since small embedded systems are beginning to use these. So what about running Erlang just with a minimal RTEMS layer without file-system and network support configured (all parts of RTEMS can be configured during application build time) and write a small OS in Erlang. Might have interesting latency properties when no conventional OS (and no visualization layer which stands in for a OS) gets in the way between Erlang and the hardware. Whoever thinks this might be fun should come to the talk.

While it can’t be a tutorial how to use RTEMS and Erlang I will say something how to get started with using it. I will tell something how the port was done and how it works and some first experiences with it and where it is headed.

Paolo – Erlang folks is more and more pushing on Embedded Systems, still most of Embedded Systems people are not aware of Erlang. How can we spread to them the Erlang word?

Peer – Build successful Embedded applications with Erlang and talk about it. But I’m skeptical that the Embedded Systems developers will pick up Erlang. I think rather than that Erlang developers with enough expertise of the low-level close to the metal stuff will have a huge advantage to build the next generation of intelligent Embedded-Systems. Personally I’m quite happy how it is at the moment, “Erlang as a trade secret” has also its advantages.

Paolo – In your opinion will Erlang be able to take its place in the Embedded Systems world? What are the future applications written in Erlang you see in the future in this sense?

Peer – Well, we’ll see. I will certainly build some more future systems with Erlang in the embedded space. I will either build these systems for my customers as contractors or as entrepreneur for my own products. Also I don’t think Erlang needs to “take” its place in Embedded Systems, its more like it might expand its area of application from Telecommunication embedded to other areas. All the buzz around Industry 4.0 and machines communicating directly with other machines along the assembly line will benefit Erlang’s use in Embedded-Systems.

I see applications with distributed AI planning algorithms built right into the embedded systems at the assembly line, the devices that directly control the motor and mechanics and RFID antennas of the transport system talking to each other and reacting flexibly to all kinds of influences. These applications can’t be built with current PLC technology that is used in this space at the moment. One needs powerful symbolic computation for these planning algorithms. Also it is necessary to be fast and flexible to adapt the software in these devices. Transparent distribution support will also be an advantage in this space. I’m looking forward to wield Erlang’s powers in this area.